The Airlift Everyone Expected to Fail
The Berlin Airlift was one of the most important and successful humanitarian operations of the 20th Century. It stopped Soviet aggression in its tracks and it helped give birth to NATO. But it almost didn't happen, and it was launched on the assumption that it would fail. Even its advocates believed it was only a 'stop-gap' measure designed to keep the situation from deteriorating until a 'diplomatic solution' could be found. When the Soviets cut off the roughly 2.2 million civilians living in the Western Sectors of Berlin from all food, fuel, medicine and other necessities in June 1948, they confidently believed they could achieve with the Blockade of Berlin what they had failed to achieve in three years of bickering and badgering in Foreign Ministers Conferences: Western acceptance of a Communist Germany. The strategy was based on the assumption that it was impossible to support a city of over two million people by air. Although initially surprised that t...